The Madingley Model is Microsoft’s open-sourced mechanistic global model of ecosystems. It reproduces observed patterns and is giving interesting results. “reproduces many of the larger-scale patterns that we can see in ecosystems, such as geographical gradients in animal biomass, or trophic pyramids. This is an exciting ‘proof of principle’ that this kind of modelling is actually possible. However, we have already begun to examine what happens when you hit the model with simulated human pressures, such as deforestation and hunting of wildlife.”

“The model is the first to couple all of the key biological processes that underpin the life cycle and behaviour of all of the millions of trillions of the planet’s organisms – photosynthesis, feeding, metabolism, reproduction, dispersal, and death – in order to attempt to capture how such processes lead to the structure and function of whole ecosystems.”

There will be dragons:Possibly used to predict mythical beasts.
“On April 1, Hamilton, May and Waters (1) drew attention to the likely resurgence of dragons under climate change. Unfortunately, their anecdotal approach fails to provide the relevant authorities with the information necessary to formulate effective mitigation strategies against the threat posed by an outbreak of these organisms.
Using a mechanistic model of whole ecosystems (The Madingley Model: 2, 3), we identified those locations where large ectotherms (adult body mass > 1.5 tonnes) could persist in a pristine world (no anthropogenic pressures) given current climatic conditions (Figure 1).”

“In the Canadian Arctic the Inuit have controversially observed that the sun is setting many kilometers further west along the horizon and the stars are no longer where they should be. Sunlight is behaving differently in this part of the world as the warming Arctic air causes temperature inversions and throws the setting sun off kilter. The nineteenth-century suspicion directed toward the sun’s capacity to mislead, to turn stable realities into distorted versions of the real, is refracted in this twenty-first-century corollary as climate change transforms the surfaces of the earth into a vast array of photographic plates, each? of which is recording the atmospheric chemistry of terrestrial change differently. For the Inuit, the world that they once knew finds no mirror image in the world that they now see.”
A film by Susan Schupli http://susanschuppli.com/writing/can-the-sun-lie-3/
A local optical effect takes place in Canadian Arctic due to the melting ice caps?

George Herbert Mead was a philosopher, one of the founders of Pragmatism.
Mead’s theory of the emergence of mind and self out of the social process of significant communication has become the foundation of the symbolic interactionist school of sociology and social psychology.

Mead introduces the idea of the “conversation of gestures” with his famous example of the dog-fight:

Dogs approaching each other in hostile attitude carry on such a language of gestures. They walk around each other, growling and snapping, and waiting for the opportunity to attack . . . . (Mind, Self and Society 14) The act of each dog becomes the stimulus to the other dog for his response. There is then a relationship between these two; and as the act is responded to by the other dog, it, in turn, undergoes change. The very fact that the dog is ready to attack another becomes a stimulus to the other dog to change his own position or his own attitude. He has no sooner done this than the change of attitude in the second dog in turn causes the first dog to change his attitude. We have here a conversation of gestures. They are not, however, gestures in the sense that they are significant. We do not assume that the dog says to himself, “If the animal comes from this direction he is going to spring at my throat and I will turn in such a way.” What does take place is an actual change in his own position due to the direction of the approach of the other dog. (Mind, Self and Society 42-43, emphasis added).

In the conversation of gestures, communication takes place without an awareness on the part of the individual of the response that her gesture elicits in others; and since the individual is unaware of the reactions of others to her gestures, she is unable to respond to her own gestures from the standpoint of others. The individual participant in the conversation of gestures is communicating, but she does not know that she is communicating. The conversation of gestures, that is, is unconscious communication.

Mead’s account of the social emergence of the self is developed further through an elucidation of three forms of inter-subjective activity: language, play, and the game. These forms of “symbolic interaction” (that is, social interactions that take place via shared symbols such as words, definitions, roles, gestures, rituals, etc.) are the major paradigms in Mead’s theory of socialization and are the basic social processes that render the reflexive objectification of the self possible.

It has been demonstrated that people’s ideas about community are formed, in part, through interactions both in online forums as well as those in face to face interactions. As a result, people act in their communities according to the meanings they derive about their environment, whether online or offline, from those interactions. This perspective reveals that online communication may very well take on different meanings for different people depending on information, circumstance, relationships, power, and other systems that make up communities of practice. People enact community the way it is conceived and the meaning of community evolves as they come up with new ways to utilize it. Given this reality, scholars are continually challenged to research and understand how online communities are comprised, how they function, and how they are connected to offline social life.[20]

Symbolic interaction theory was discussed in “The Cyberself: The Self-ing Project goes online, Symbolic Interaction in the Digital Age.” Robinson discusses how symbolic interaction theory explains the way individuals create a sense of self through their interactions with others. However, she believes advances in technology have changed this.

John Cage
“I learned the traditional reason for making a piece of music in India: “to quiet the mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences.”
Lou Harrison, meanwhile, was reading in an old English text, I think as old as the sixteenth century, and he found this reason given for writing a piece of music: “to quiet the mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences.”
”
“A sober and quiet mind is one in which the ego does not obstruct the fluency of the things that come in through our senses and up through our dreams. Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.”

This echoes The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th Century mystical text in line with the teachings of contemplative traditions throughout the world.

“The Cloud’s de-emphasis on the activity of the intelligence represents a seemingly archetypal impulse hinted at even in Platonic texts: that the ultimate reality which the mystic seeks to experience is finally beyond the grasp of the intellect (Louth, p. 13).”
“the very soul grew silent to herself and by not thinking of self mounted beyond self.”
“The Cloud of Unknowing, a masterpiece of simplicity that distills a complex mystical epistemology and discipline into engagingly readable prose, embodies a paradox. It offers a method by which the suitably disposed reader may practice an advanced and even austere form of contemplation – the divesting of the mind of all images and concepts through an encounter with a “nothing and a nowhere” that leads to the mysterious and unfathomable being of God Himself. Yet as the account of this exercise unfolds, the genial and hospitable tone of the author humanizes the austerity of the method and persuasively draws the reader into what Evelyn Underhill calls “the loving discernment of Reality””[Patrick Gallacher]

The Cloud of Unknowing teaches that to prepare ourselves to receive a gift of understanding, we must enter a state of quiet stillness, suspended between heaven and earth. Above lies a “cloud of unknowing”, which our understanding can never penetrate. Rationality is only in the way of experience of the real. To access the Real, one has to suspend the “I” and to do so, one has to pass through a state where one no longer knows anything.
In other words, The Cloud of Unknowing is the bridge between naturalism and nihilism.
“The basic argument concerns the justification of knowledge (or epistemology) in light of one’s world view.”

Fluid dynamics as bases for ideology of the air in this essay by Michelle Addington:

***Perceptual environments- those that determine what we feel, hear and see – are all thermodynamic in that they are fundamentally about the motion of energy. Furthermore, as energy is not visible, thermodynamic systems are not legible.***

The tools do exist, the knowledge is available, but we must shift our contexts through which we define the body’s environment in a building.
The contexts in question are those that are premised on formal determinism. The concept of boundary, the
use of scale, and d1e choice of the reference frame seem pro forma to us, but the presumption that d1e building,
particularly its form, serves as the point of origin for defining these is antithetical to the description of energy
systems. In these systems, boundaries are behaviors, not walls, and scale relates to d1e phenomenon and not to
d1e size of the building. More difficult to untangle is d1e issue of d1e reference frame, being shifted from one in
which d1e building is d1e objective determinant to one in which d1e subject operates as d1e center. The following
essay steps away from om normative representation of d1e perceptual environment, and begins to ask how
we might reconfigure d1ese contexts in order to produce architecture as a construction of subjective effects rad1er
than an assembly of objective artifacts.

Orthographic projection produced the objectified surface – fixed Cartesian space and endlessly reproducible. What cannot be easily reproduced is the perception of experience of the environment that is always transient, always unique. […]
This objectification of the surface as both progenitor and the representative frame of environmental phenomena keeps us tautologically bound to a Renaissance definition of space even while our surface forms have become progressively articulated and non-orthogonal. Escaping this bind requires that we subordinate the hegemony of the picture-plane representation, and begin to understand the surface as fluid and contingent rather than fixed and constituent. Only then can we begin to apply the unprecedented array of tools now available, which allows for the representation of phenomenological behavior.

from “Softspace: From a Representation of Form to a Simulation of Space”
essay by Michelle Addington

Drop attackMerely by looking up you experience and unprovoked fall. Merely by lifting your face to the sky you would immediately loose balance and fall. A Drop attack is defined as a sudden fall without loss of consciousness.
Drop attacks stem from diverse mechanisms including leg weakness and knee instability but have also been attributed to transient vertebrobasilar insufficiency, epilepsy and unstable vestibular function among other reasons. Those afflicted typically experience abrupt leg weakness, sometimes after sudden movement of the head. The weakness may persist for hours. The term drop attack is used to categorize otherwise unexplained falls encompassing a wide variety of etiology and is considered ambiguous medical terminology. Drop attacks are currently reported much less often than in the past, possibly as a result of better diagnostic precision.[wikipedia]

IlinxIlinx is type of play that destroys order and stability of perception.

Racing downhill or sledging create the conditions of ilinx. Ilinx is a category of play that relates to the experience of a fall, a space of disorder based on the pleasurable pursuit of vertigo. According to Caillois, other physical activities that produce ilinx include, “the tightrope, falling or being projected into space, rapid rotation, sliding, speeding and acceleration of vertilinear movement, separately or in combination with gyrating movement” “Man, Play and Games” by Caillois (from Emma Cocker, “Over and Over, Again and Again”)

Experiencing the clouds is opposite then feeling grounded — both in the literal sense of being planted on the ground, and in the figurative sense of feeling stable, knowing, locked into a predictable pattern. Just the opposite, a feeling of unsteadiness and unstable ground is required. Here it is supplied by simply destabilizing the body and by replacing visual reference points.

New studies say climate change makes the Earth less spherical and therefore spin slower, making our days a little longer. This is due to the ice caps melting and gravity and centrifugal force redistributing the body of water on the planet towards the equator.

Not only are we reshaping the surface of the Earth, we are actually changing the shape of the planet. Policy decisions in this case can be directly linked to changing the shape of the planet.
A few articles with more details: Study shows longer days, Earth spins slower study, and this is nice in framing: “refocusing attention from the horizontal of modern Earth science to the vertical”: Why our intuition is wrong

Theophagy is a word of Ancient Greek origin that means “the feeding on a god” or “eating/devouring god”, from ???? (Theós, “god”) and the suffix -phagy (to feed on, to eat/devour).

In fertility rituals, the harvested grain may itself be the reborn god of vegetation. This practice has origins in ancient religions: Dionysus and many examples are documented in The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer.

Theophagy was the widely spread practice in the ancient world of eating the body of the deity. In Christianity this practice continues in the consumption of the Eucharist, in which the consecrated bread and wine, which Catholics believed is the body and blood of Jesus Christ, is consumed in the ritual of Holy Communion. Early Christians ate the paschal lamb, the burnt offering that symbolized the crucified Jesus.

It is done to achieve:

• Great clarity

• God transfers his regenerating, recreating Spirit to humankind through this medium

• a visionary ‘meal’ experience—a gastronomical vision—in which the initiate ingests the presence of God

• to prompt the visionary-cognitive encounter with the divine. Upon beholding God directly, the initiate takes possession of the Spirit of life and undergoes an ontological transformation such that he or she comes to possess the existence of the new creation